 "Minefield")
This year was perhaps the best ever for documentary film makers in the country. Indie cinema too got a leg up and Bollywood added a few more members to its elite Rs 100-crore club. The coming year seems to carry this spirit of optimism forward with a great line-up. It looks like a year of period dramas with the most expensive and expansive films to come out of Bollywood, regional and indie cinema
BOLLYWOOD
Director: Sriram Raghavan
Badlapur, the neo-noir revenge thriller, will see Varun Dhawan in a new avatar with a dark and edgy role. The trailers have been impressive enough to make Badlapur one of the top picks of the first half of the year. The film’s stark cinematography and addictively trippy music is reminiscent of Sriram Raghavan’s acclaimed film, Johnny Gaddar.
Releasing: February 20, 2015
Director: Shonali Bose
This Kalki Koechlin-starrer has been making waves for dealing with a subject that hasn’t been seen on screen before: the sexual and sensual yearnings of a young woman with cerebral palsy. Bose has based the film on her cousin who suffers from the disease, and Koechlin has supposedly lent an authenticity to the film that is already creating major awards buzz.
Releasing: March 2015
Bajirao Mastani
Director: Sanjay Leela Bhansali
Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s long-cherished magnum opus will finally hit the screens at the end of 2015, with Ram Leela’s lead pair, Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone, essaying the roles of Maratha Peshwa Bajirao and his second wife, Mastani. Priyanka Chopra plays Bajirao’s first wife, Kashibai. With the lead pair undergoing extensive training in Kalaripayattu, one can expect, at the very least, a visual treat from Bhansali.
Releasing: December 2015
Tamasha
Director: Imtiaz Ali
Old flames Ranbir Kapoor and Deepika Padukone come together for Imtiaz Ali’s next. Tamasha sounds like a feel-good rom-com to end the year with, where the lead pair fall in love on an exotic island in France and form a travelling troupe of sorts, staging dramatic plays and winning hearts.
Releasing: December 2015
Bombay Velvet
Director: Anurag Kashyap
Anurag Kashyap’s neo-noir drama, based on historian Gyan Prakash’s book Mumbai Fables is set in Bombay of the 1960s, a highly-anticipated period drama. The film tells the story of a boxer, Johnny Balraj played by Ranbir Kapoor, and an aspiring jazz singer, Rosie played by Anushka Sharma. With Kashyap’s latest release Ugly receiving rave reviews for being his most beautifully shot film till date, Bombay Velvet has a lot to follow up.
Releasing: May 15, 2015
INDIE
Director: Chaitanya Tamhane
Writer-director Chaitanya Tamhane’s debut film, Court, has been touring the film-festival circuit. It has been making all the right noises and winning it big at the Venice Film Festival and the Singapore Film Festival. Set in an Indian court room, but with a much faster plot pace than Ek Ruka Hua Faisla, Court is being hailed as an intelligently scripted drama that comments on our dysfunctional judicial system.
Releasing: First half of 2015
Director: Prashant Nair
When a young village boy discovers that his brother, long believed to be in America, has actually gone missing, he begins to invent letters on his behalf to save their mother from heartbreak, all the while searching for him. Umrika will mark the Hindi-language debut of the Life of Pi star Suraj Sharma. It also features The Grand Budapest Hotel’s breakout star Tony Revolori and is currently nominated in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at Sundance 2015.
Releasing: Not finalised
Tumbad
Director: Rahi Barve
Anand Gandhi’s next venture after Ship of Theseus is Tumbad, named after fictitious village in Pune. The film starring Sohum Shah has been described by the film crew as a moody, atmospheric, contemporary horror film. Gandhi is tight-lipped about it, but he did tell us that it was period drama set it in India of the 1930s-40s.“It’s a saga of a dark secret passed on from generation to another. It is also a story of how a nation moved from feudalism to colonialism to nationalism.”
Releasing: End of 2015
Director: Shiladitya Bora
Minefield is a political thriller by debutante director Shiladitya Bora. It is based on a real-life account of a Jaffna-based Tamil film maker and how LTTE chief Prabhakaran entrusted him with setting up a school for training young wounded militants in videography and media. Cinematographer Rajeev Ravi, editor A Sreekar Prasad and Oscar-winning sound designer Resul Pookutty are working on the film.
Releasing: December 2015
DOCUMENTARY
Placebo
Director: Abhay Kumar
Placebo is a hybrid essay documentary by Abhay Kumar that deals with the subject of the pressures of academic excellence. It has been produced by 82 collaborators via crowdfunding in association with AKFPL, a company set up by Anurag Kashyap and producer Guneet Monga. It had a world premiere at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in December where it was a part of the top four films.
Releasing: Second half of 2015
Director: Shabani Hassanwalia and Samreen Farooqui
The documentary feature, Being Bhaijaan, explores the impact of Salman Khan’s blockbuster-manufactured machismo on small-town men by documenting the story of a Salman Khan look-alike: the Junior Salman of Nagpur, and his two friends. There is a a deliciously ironic possibility that the film might release with Bajrangi Bhaijaan, Salman Khan’s next magnum opus.
Releasing: May-June 2015
Directors: Khusbhoo Ranka and Vinay Shukla
The crowed-funded documentary chronicling the Aam Aadmi Party’s rise in Delhi is in the post-production stage and should hit the festival circuit as well as the screens sometime in 2015, even more pertinent now with the Delhi assembly elections looming over our heads. Produced by Anand Gandhi and Ruchi Bhimani, the documentary has already amassed great support on social media and by internationally awarded funds.
Releasing: Second half of 2015
REGIONAL
Baahubali 1 and 2
Director: SS Rajamouli
With a budget of over Rs 175 crores, this two-part epic in Tamil and Telugu is considered the most expensive film ever made in the country. Produced by Arka Mediaworks, this drama has some mammoth war sequences created by internationally renowned VFX technicians. With the popular pairing of Rana Daggubati and Anushka Shetty, Baahubali is generating quite a buzz.
Releasing: April 17, 2015, part 2 in the second half
Rudaramadevi
Director: Gunasekhar
This is one of the first Indian 3D epic films. It has been produced in Telugu and Tamil and will be dubbed in other languages. Anushka Shetty plays the titular role of the 13th century Telugu queen of the Kakatiya dynasty. Once again, she is paired with Rana Daggubati, who plays Chalukya Veerabhadra, the prince of Nidavardhya Puram.
Releasing: Not finalised
Nirbashito
Director: Churni Ganguly
Inspired by Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen and her cat Minu, Nirbashito (English title: banished) is the first film directed by actor Churni Ganguly, that saw its premiere to critical acclaim at the Mumbai Interational Film Festival earlier this year. A bilingual film (Bengali and English) shot in Kolkata and Sweden, Nirbashito is a fictional take on the political writer’s life -- the mere making of which both Nasreen and Ganguly consider a political success. Ganguly is working on releasing the film in Kolkata first, and hopefully the rest of the country shall follow suit.
Releasing: Not finalised
